January 15, 2009
I was digging through a fire sale of sorts when I found this, having never heard of it. I checked the credits (as I do with any movie at a low price I've never heard of) and noticed it was directed by Paul Bartel and placed it in my "to buy" stack immediately. Shortly thereafter,...( read more) I discovered "Trailers from Hell", a site that has directors commenting on trailers for grindhouse, exploitation, horror and...actually mainstream (as of now, the most recent is for Ben-Hur, of all things!) movies. John Landis commented on this trailer, amusingly, but with an honest appreciation for it, telling us he didn't want to give too much away, because it's a "really good film." I was certainly intrigued by now, though the only Bartel film I've actually seen other than this is Death Race 2000. Not that Death Race 2000 is something that would make one shy away from Bartel (quite the opposite, in fact, if you ask me), but it's still only one film. Actually, I decided to double-check myself and he, too, directed some episodes of Amazing Stories, which I've always loved and had more than its fair share of quality directors behind episodes (having been assembled under the eye of Steven Spielberg). He does appear in small roles in various films, of course, often for cult directors (probably owing to his work with Roger Corman--like Death Race 2000). All I recall is that after I finished watching that first one, my father responded with surprise that Bartel had directed and planted the name Eating Raoul in my head--which I've yet to see.
Cheryl Stratton (Ayn Ruymen) is a girl who has not yet legally reached adulthood, having moved to California with her friend Judy (Ann Gibbs) from their home in Cleveland. When Judy catches Cheryl sneaking a peek at her adventures with boyfriend Mike (Len Travis), she flies into a rage and Cheryl skips out, seeking out the King Edward Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which her Aunt Martha Atwood manages. Martha is reluctant to take on new occupants, being vaguely puritanical and wanting to maintain her idea of respectability in terms of the hotel's clientele. She eventually relents and lets the somewhat painted Cheryl in, but she'd already failed respectability as it was. Mr. Lovejoy is never dry (and I don't mean he likes a good bath and singing in the rain), Reverend Moon (Laurie Main) is an eccentric and openly closeted homosexual priest with a thing for young men (though at least men, insofar as we see), Mrs. Quigley (Dorothy Neumann) is a senile old woman forever asking after prior tenant Alice, and George is a shut-in photographer who oozes just a little too much creepy. Cheryl is determined to be seen as an adult, though, and is trying to find her way into both adulthood and sex--first, of course, voyeuristically observing her older roommate and later attempting to use make-up and dress to draw the attentions of men (for more "adult" activities). Martha is no fan of this, nor of Cheryl's attempts to find male attention from George or the locksmith's son Jeff (Stanley Livingston). Unbeknownst to Cheryl, her choice of venue for finding adulthood has a few kinks she was not aware of--the most important of which is a tendency for those who come into the hotel looking for her to turn up dead.
I think something is, alas, lost in this film being viewed more than a quarter century after its original release, when its ideas and themes are more commonplace (I saw a lot of it coming), but the tone is still unusual enough that the film itself is not lost for it. The words I see associated with most everything I see Bartel associated with are "black comedy." This film is not an exception. The eccentricities and oddities of this movie are definite and quite amusing. Laurie Main (whose other film roles I've seen are in My Fair Lady and Time After Time--weird!) is hilarious as the lascivious but apparently harmless priest (whose eyes light up whenever handsome young men appear), and Neumann's bizarre behaviour has a wonderfully non-sequitur nature that doesn't have the modern, clumsy smack of being insane just for being insane. This is certainly in contrast to the plot of the increasingly strange behaviour of George, which most strongly relates to the theatrical poster image of Cheryl's face superimposed on a transparent doll filled with water--and a syringe.
Landis made comments about an "Argento" or "European" sort of tone when he was discussing the film (which I, ever interested in no-spoilers-whatsoever, thankfully forgot), which is the most interesting thing about it. Not so much that it is (or is not) Argento-esque, so much as the fact that the low budget is readily apparent, but easily overtaken by strong cinematography from DP Andrew Davis and a very strong feel in general. This is Bartel's feature debut and it doesn't really look at all like it is any such thing. It's beautifully shot and looks more professional than some bigger films from the same time, especially with such a rich colour palette--likely where Landis saw Argento. The actors are all excellent, with even the eccentric characters and their humorousness not stretching the suspension of disbelief too close to the breaking point and keeping Ruymen's believably young and curious performance just that believable.
I did spend most of the movie trying to remember what Paul Bartel looked like (I had vague images of a mostly-balding man with dark hair and a somewhat dour face), because I was convinced he would appear somewhere in the movie. Main threw me off for just a moment, but I realized not long after he appeared that his face did not match my mental image (however vague). Finally, he did make an appearance as a random homeless person in a park who snaps off a silly line to Cheryl at one point, but it fulfilled my expectation, in some way sealing in my mind the comfort with which Bartel pulled off the project as a whole. It's a weird film ("Clearly not for every taste" as Leonard Maltin puts it), but a cleverly made one, and one that happily dabbles in taboos and fetishes without doing so for purely exploitative reasons (OK, maybe the bath scene, just a bit). It seems like Bartel (and writers Philip Kearney and Les Rendelstein) are simply in their natural element--or at least in one that seems perfectly normal to them, making for the perfect ground to explore (even if done with a clear sense of titillation) these things and use them as the backdrop for what I suppose you would term a horror movie (though the body count is low and more inconsequential than you might expect) with a nice steady drip of bizarre and highly amusing humour in its veins (instead of, thankfully, being injected rapidly from a full syringe...).
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